Month: June 2010

I started off determined not to direct anything, I started off randomly. To follow the flow of a wander actively (as if that’s possible), without seeking something specific, because in myths and fairytales are recorded passing memories, indefinite, long and well forgotten. Framed memories to shout that the years went by and we never took enough revenge. It is a rushed journey, not out of frivolity but out of impatience and need. Plain, laconic, unvarnished.

Perception becomes an experience only when it connects to the senses – memories of the past, the present, and the future.

Warm light, they say, loosens the defences, whichever defences, even I – I think – belong here. I learn daily. The probable and the expected have become a surprise. New goals, new plans, fresh fields to reap. You have to do what the instinct and others have indicated as a solution. Don’t be afraid, not even for a moment. Memories are made to last only until you erase them. You or some other new memories surpass them in duration, intensity, in bravado. We are all afraid of the next step, don’t let them convince you of the opposite; travel in the world of yearning. The risk is counted in comparison to what you have to win, not lose.

P.S. The axiom of priceless time: the amount of trust which you may dare to gamble on someone will be proportionate to the time you present them with.

P.P.S. Our time is the only tangible good we own to invest. I do not take it lightly, that’s why I invest as much back to equalize the rates. Trust me it is no stock market bubble.

Sometimes I think backwards and I try to recall when I stopped withering undeservingly. I head quite far back to find it and I upset myself a tad for the time lost and for loss in general. I do not think specifically. This morning I was skimming again through Remarque’s “Black Obelisk” and I spotted the line which says that we do not miss places or faces, we only miss our own self as it was there and then. On the other hand, I am not exactly sure I miss myself. Not that I miss places or faces, I just have an enormous millstone where the stomach separates from the lungs when I think about “grand things” in their time that are now forever gone. Random things, big or small.

A smurf-y car for example. Or a stand for pancakes on the Westminster Bridge in London. A carousel ride by the Trocadero in Paris. An airport in Alexandroupolis. A wine bar in Beeston. A pastry sweet in Prague. A balcony in Plaka. A French bakery in the Upper West Side. A staircase on Puerta del Sol. A car repair shop in Thessaloniki. A train station clock in Boston. A cartoon sandwich shop in Komotini. A sprayed wall in Berlin. A gelateria and the odd brides up Piazelle Michelangelo in Florence. A mojito in Havana. A purple rainbow bus in Nottingham. All those things that six and a half billion people would be dulled to read and ask for, all those things that, either slower or faster than myself, will pass and be forgotten. All those things that will have changed nothing for anyone else but me. Me that I feel my chest cracking from all these packed things that I have no one to share with and I will have no one to inherit to. All these things that through their eternal insignificance had all the significance in the world but perished before they faded.

I think back and I try to remember when I started to live, even in pieces, and I try to remember when it was that all the things that were disorderly started to intoxicate me. And I read the Black Obelisk again, but really, I don’t miss myself, I miss them. They are many, little and instant, connected to creatures now dead in their change through time, tied to unrepeatable moments. Maybe they were insignificant, I don’t know, but they are lost forever and I remember them. No one else can really grasp them but myself. And that, as such, can be liberating but – sometimes – aches a bit.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.T.S. Eliot – “Burnt Norton” Four Quartets

It is equally sad, each and every time, to encounter
empty towers and people with wings
afraid of heights.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel.T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
(No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’)

P.S. I decided I like fairy tales more than poertry; too bad Eliot didn’t write any. [Or did he?]